WEA BRIGHTON & HOVE BRANCH
SPRING 2010

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AMERICAN SHORT STORIES
10 discussion classes of two hours' duration
Wednesday afternoons at 2.30pm - 4.30pm from 13 January 2010
 Friends Centre, Ship Street, Brighton

CLASS TUTOR: DR ARNOLD GOLDMAN

this page was updated on 29 October 2009.

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INDEX

I        CLASS READING
II      THE FIRST AND SECOND CLASSES
III     SYLLABUS - date of class - author - stories to be discussed
IV      STORY TEXTS ON THE WEB
V       AUTHOR SITES ON THE WEB
VI      LINKS TO LOCAL BOOKSHOPS
VII    INFORMATION ON THE WEB ABOUT AMERICAN SHORT STORIES
VIII  LITERARY CRITICISM OF THE SHORT STORY

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 I  CLASS READING -
 The Oxford Book of American Short Stories
 Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain"

Underlined stories in stories to be discussed (below) are available free to read/download on the World Wide Web.

All the stories to be read bar one are in The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, edited by Joyce Carol Oates (Oxford University Press, 1994), £11.99. The price from www.amazon.co.uk is £8.38 (postage free if Supersaver delivery used); from www.play.com it's £7.50 or £8.29. For those who've not previously purchased the anthology, copies can be ordered from Amazon after the first class, and we hope it will then be available for distribution at the second class and use at the third class.

The only other story to purchase - or borrow - is Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" - in Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other Stories - alternative titles Close Range: Wyoming Stories V. 1 and Wyoming Stories V. 1 (HarperPerennial, £7.99; £6.99 or £5.49 from www.amazon.co.uk).

Second-hand copies of these books can also be found at www.amazon.co.uk, www.abebooks.co.uk and others. In addition to the price, there is a postal and handling charge (usually about £2.75 each).

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 II  THE FIRST AND SECOND CLASSES

For those as yet without a copy of The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, copies of stories for the first two weeks (13 January and 20 January) are both downloadable from this webpage or are available as email attachments from the class tutor. For those without The Oxford Book or copies from websites or email attachments, photocopies can also be made available at the first class - for the first and second classes only. Please tel. 01273 478470 by Monday 11 January at the latest to arrange for photocopying to be done and brought to the class. Stories should, of course, be read before the class so far as possible.

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III THE SYLLABUS


date of class		 author
click on an underlined name to go
to a website about the author		 stories to be discussed
for a website with a free text of the story,
click on an underlined story and print it out - see STORY TEXTS ON THE WEB for advice.
13 January Edgar Allan Poe [Poe on the short story - tutor-provided text]
"The Tell-Tale Heart"
20 January Washington Irving
Nathaniel Hawthorne		 "Rip Van Winkle"
"The Wives of the Dead"
27 January Mark Twain
Henry James		 "Cannibalism in the Cars"
"The Middle Years"
3 February Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Stetson

Edith Wharton

 "The Yellow Wallpaper"
"The Yellow Wallpaper": the 1892 magazine text
"A Journey"
10 February Stephen Crane
Sherwood Anderson		 "The Little Regiment"
"The Strength of God"
17 February - no class
24 February Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald		 "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"
"An Alcoholic Case"
3 March Katherine Anne Porter
 Paul Bowles
Flannery O'Connor		 "He"
"A Distant Episode"
"A Late Encounter with the Enemy"
10 March Eudora Welty
Saul Bellow		 "Where Is the Voice Coming From"
"Something To Remember Me By"
17 March Raymond Carver
William Faulkner		 "Are These Actual Miles?"
"That Evening Sun"
24 March Annie Proulx "Brokeback Mountain"

for a website about an author, click on an underlined author name

this course syllabus is on the world wide web at www.cowbeech.force9.co.uk/AmericanShortStories.htm
updates will be added


IV   STORY TEXTS ON THE WEB

Texts of all but one of the stories we will be discussing at the first six classes are available from various sources on the world wide web (without cost). Any underlined story in the syllabus can be accessed from the web.

You can print the story out from the webpage, or you can save the story in a file on your PC. Texts from some sites, like those from Project Gutenberg, are not easy to read as presented on the web, whether on the screen or printed out, both in font style and by containing extraneous materials. Once in your own file, you can clear the text of unwanted material, change the text into the font you prefer to read it in, save it again and then print it out.

Many literary texts can be found at the Online Books Page (University of Pennsylvania), from Project Gutenberg and from bartleby.com's author page - but there are other full-text pages as well. Entering a story's title within double inverted commas (quotation marks) into Google can also provide you with a link to a webpage containing the story you're seeking - but you'll need to hunt around and to avoid links to advertisements for books containing the text. In addition, for American (and other) short stories, there is

A selection of Classic American Short Stories
Twenty Great American Short Stories
Classic Short Stories
 Bibliomania
Yahoo! Geocities Short Story Classics
Short Story Index: links to authors' short stories


V  AUTHOR SITES ON THE WEB

Links to websites about authors in the syllabus are indicated by underlined names. There are often other websites - even many other websites - for an individual author than those provided here: I've linked to a variety of the kinds of sites that exist - academic, author society, encyclopedia, publisher, commercial (.com). I've mainly linked this page to non-commercial sites, but not in every case. You may wish to search for others. Entering "The Author's Name" (within double inverted commas) into Google will provide links to author websites - but also to other sites. Jack Lynch's literary references on the net is a useful starting point for author web-searching.

East of the Web has a short story author page. Wikipedia has a list of short story authors (with links to the Wikipedia entry for each).


VI  LINKS TO LOCAL BOOKSHOPS

Second-hand books in Brighton

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 VII  INFORMATION ON THE WEB ABOUT AMERICAN SHORT STORIES

The American Short Story: A Selective Chronology
Wikipedia's American short stories category
Classic Short Stories related links

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 VIII  LITERARY CRITICISM OF THE SHORT STORY

Short Story Analysis (English Resources) - questions to ask yourself
Short Story elements (Miss Engram's English Classroom) - created for Canadian high school students
The Short Story (Simon Fraser University) - history and characteristics
Characteristics of the short story (netcomuk.co.uk)
short story (factmonster.com)
Short Story reviews and criticism (University of North Carolina University Libraries)
Short Story (Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia entry)
What IS a Short-Story (Alex Keegan)
History of the Short-Story (Classic Reader)

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